Mikylvxka Hllupo

for bass and pierrot ensemble (fl, cl/bcl, pno, vln, vlc)Text by Robert FengCommissioned by Robert Feng Premiere: Robert Feng, bassSpring 2019Duration: 15'

When Robert Feng proposed the idea of a song cycle for bass singer with pierrot ensemble, I was excited to see the interplay of the voice with the ensemble, as opposed to my recent works with voice that were only accompanied by piano. However, when I received the text for Mikylvxka Hllupo (also by Robert), I became ecstatic. Mikylvxka Hllupo is not a ‘song cycle’ in the traditional sense, but more of a scene for singer and pierrot ensemble. The text follows an unnamed speaker’s hallucinatory journey through its crests and troughs, reaching ecstatic highs and ultimately a sublimely horrifying descent into the dark plains of the human un-conscience as they come face to face with an incomprehensible terror. The piece travels along this mental odyssey as the speaker unravels their consciousness and is exposed to rapturously illuminating beings, but then is led to a cataclysmic realm of unheralded dismay and unadulterated monstrosities. When dealing with such a special and unique text, I studied two wide-ranging sources of inspiration; first (and possibly most evident within the text itself) is the horror fiction of H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft’s works, most notably The Call of Cthulhu, At the Mountains of Madness, and The Colour Out of Space, deal with notions of terror that are so large and beyond human comprehension that Lovecraft’s characters are often driven to a maniacal madness by the mere presence of these ancient netherworldly beings. The second and perhaps the wildest source of inspiration was Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 surreal horror film House. House follows the bizarrely comic and nihilistically macabre deaths of a group of schoolgirls at the main character’s aunt’s house. The film is acid-laden with purposefully cheap special effects, surprise musical numbers, and stream-of-consciousness cutaways, displaying a penchant for a style encompassing both the classical direction of Howard Hawks and Akira Kurosawa, while mixing it with the bubblegum-pink ecstasy and youth-driven rebellion that would come to define the first post-WWII generation of Japan. In one of the most memorable scenes of the film, one of the girls (aptly named Melody) is eaten by a piano while she plays the soundtrack. As she is consumed in piano wires, Melody laughs joyously at the fact that she can see her own torso. Mixing these wildly different, yet somehow similar pieces of art with Robert’s original text yields what I hope is a piece steeped in a sense of contrasting euphoria and horror, meaning and non-meaning, and the sublime. ​